Writers and the Optimal-Child-Count Spectrum

Lauren Sandler, the author of “One and Only,” a new book about only children, published an essay on the Web site of The Atlantic last week remarking on the fact that many of the female writers she most admires—Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick, Ellen Willis—all had only one child. In the article, which was bait-titled “The Secret to Being Both a Successful Writer and a Mother: Have Just One Kid,” Sandler articulated a distinction between “motherhood” and “momishness”—the former a condition of elevated fulfillment, an expression of the desire to “love deeply and intimately” and “to never turn away from a human experience,” the latter an altogether sloppier situation involving kitchens, sinks, and the wiping down of small, grubby humans. “How do [we] negotiate the balance between selfhood and motherhood?” Sandler wrote. “Is stopping at one child the answer, or at least the beginning of one?”

Whatever the validity of Sandler’s suggestion, the article made one thing clear: the secret to aggravating writers who are also mothers is to publish an article saying that the secret to being a writer and mother is to have only one child. Jane Smiley was the first big-name author to respond: in the comments section, she enumerated her books (there are twenty-three, she says); her honors (winner of a Pulitzer, shortlisted for the Orange Prize); and her children (“three children of my own, and two stepchildren”). Zadie Smith, mother of two, also posted a comment. “Does the fact that Heidi Julavits, Nikita Lalwani, Nicole Krauss, Jhumpa Lahiri, Vendela Vida, Curtis Sittenfeld, Marilynne Robinson, [and] Toni Morrison… have multiple children make them lesser writers?” she wrote. “Are four children a problem for the writer Michael Chabon—or just for his wife, the writer Ayelet Waldman?”

Sometimes it seems it will never end, this debate over what women who are also mothers can and can’t do. It’s the op-ed topic that keeps on giving. Most of the time, however, when issues of work-life balance—that deathless coinage—are under discussion, the question is whether motherhood renders a woman less effective in fulfilling her non-maternal responsibilities. Lately, the popular narrative has been dominated by the silicon feminism of Sheryl Sandberg, who urges young women not to shy away from seeking jobs they love in their pre-childbearing years—so as to have an alluring workplace to return to after giving birth—and by the high-profile example of Marissa Mayer, the C.E.O. of Yahoo, who eschewed maternity leave for herself and abolished the often mother-friendly perk of working from home for her employees.

What Sandler’s essay implies is that, on the contrary, there may be something about the experience of motherhood that makes a woman a better writer—more deeply in touch with the deepest of human concerns and commonalities. But, at the same time, too much motherhood might swamp a potentially brilliant writer with the drudgery of diapers and Little League, reducing her to overseeing her child’s admissions essays rather than writing her own scintillating works a la Sontag or Hardwick. Opting for an only child is Sandler’s distinctive variation on the theme of women having it all. Mothering just one: all the rewards and a fraction of the stress, like choosing frozen yogurt over premium ice cream.

Sandler’s book is surely more nuanced than her editor’s headline, though its subtitle, “The Freedom of Having an Only Child, and the Joy of Being One,” leaves no doubt as to where she lands on the optimal-child-count spectrum. But whether intentionally or not, Sandler’s essay is a contribution to the all-too-familiar promotion of divisiveness among women. There is already enough easily fomented and self-righteous side-taking—between women who opt for motherhood versus those who do not; between stay-at-home versus work-for-pay moms. Now we have new grounds for division: my family structure is more freeing than your family structure.

It’s true that mothering an only child has its seductions; it’s also true that, in mothering as in everything else, one tends to marshal the evidence to support one’s own particular circumstances, be they deliberately chosen or arrived at by default. When I am at an airport with my eight-year-old son, en route to Europe for the third time in the space of a year, I marvel at how easy, how relatively affordable, and how deeply pleasurable it is to jet around in dyadic exclusivity, as opposed to also having in tow the second child I once hoped for. And when I am at a jovial dinner table with my three stepsons, now all in or approaching their early twenties, I think what a trick I’ve pulled off in acquiring a large family even after postponing childbearing until perilously late. Under such circumstances, I also reflect on the example of George Eliot, who bore no children herself, but who became a stepmother to the three sons of George Henry Lewes. I doubt an essay entitled “The Secret to Being a Successful Writer and Mother: Have Three Stepsons” would gain much Internet traction, but the Lewes boys’ influence on Eliot’s work and preoccupations is overlooked by those who categorize her simply as a childless writer—of whom, it hardly needs reiterating, there have been many whose desire to love intimately and deeply, and not to turn from human experience, is in no doubt.

As both Smiley and Smith point out, the key—nothing so occult as a secret—to their ability to marry motherhood and writing has been adequate child care, which remains the desideratum of every working mother, whether she’s a writer or something else. Any person’s independent productivity depends not upon the head count of her children but the sum of her free hours. Meanwhile, a writer’s true success—in the sense of her ability to write something original and meaningful—also depends upon the range of her imagination, the precision of her critical faculties, and, crucially, the extent of her capacity for empathy. And this last characteristic would include the ability to recognize that familial configurations, be they chosen or imposed, cannot be reduced to winning formulae. As the writers we return to—those with offspring and those without—have always known, any amount of mothering is enough to break your heart every day, and also to fill it.